Beyond ‘Hunting Grounds’: Eastern Siouan-Speaking Peoples and Land Stewardship in Southwest Virginia  

Victoria Persinger Ferguson, Enrolled Citizen of the Monacan Indian Nation; Director of the Solitude-Fraction Site, Virginia Tech

Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Professor of Sociology, Virginia Tech

The Eastern Siouan-speaking peoples, including the tribes of the Monacan Alliance, have inhabited and stewarded a large portion of the land that is presently known as Southwest Virginia for more than 10,000 years. Indigenous culture in this region changed from nomadic to sedentary approximately 2,000 years ago, when Eastern Siouan tribes built semi-permanent towns, such as Belspring, Shannon, and Totera, which were located in what are known today as Pulaski, Montgomery, and Roanoke Counties.[i]  

For millennia, the Eastern Siouan-speaking tribes depended on the Appalachian forests for survival. The knowledge of the natural resources needed for food, clothing, shelter, tools, medicine, and household goods was cultivated over thousands of years, and this knowledge was passed down orally from one generation to the next. Long before European contact, the Eastern Siouan tribes grew food—such as goosefoot, squash, maize, beans, and Jerusalem artichokes—in extensive gardens.[ii] The majority of their diet, however, consisted of food that was hunted or gathered in the forests and open meadows, both of which were tended and maintained through prescribed burning practices that allowed certain nut-bearing trees and other plants to flourish and also helped to attract grazing wild game.[iii],[iv] As Indigenous ecologists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake have noted, the practice of intentional burning created a “mosaic of habitat patches that promoted food security by ensuring a diverse and productive landscape.”[v]

In the early spring, leafy-green vegetables were the first edible plants to emerge after winter dormancy. Eastern Siouan families would harvest the young shoots of greens like pokeweed, ramps, wild onions, red-root amaranth, yellow wood-sorrel, wood nettle, and wild lettuce to add to their cooking pots. Wild mushrooms, such as morels, began to appear on the forest floor and were likewise incorporated into meals.

Later in the spring and early summer, a variety of fruits became available, including wild strawberries, blackberries, black raspberries, blueberries, huckleberries, serviceberries, mayapples, and red mulberries. Staghorn sumac berries and herbs like mint were harvested and dried for winter tea.  Many of the berries, which were an important source of Vitamin C, were dried on mats and stored for the winter months.

The nut harvest, which began in late summer and early fall, was particularly important because of the high fat content in hickory nuts, chestnuts, butternuts, and black walnuts, which were gathered and stored for winter. White oak acorns also provided the Eastern Siouan tribes a flour option other than cornmeal for making bread. Other fruits, including pawpaws, winter grapes, and persimmons, ripened later in the fall. Wild mushrooms and medicinal roots and herbs, such as black cohosh, goldenseal, American ginseng, hepatica, pipsissewa, and running cedar, were harvested, preserved, and used throughout the year. In addition to wild plants and fungi, the mammals, birds, and fish that were hunted and harvested were a central part of the Eastern Siouan peoples’ diet. Archeological evidence reveals that deer and turkey were the most commonly eaten meat in Monacan towns.

As Europeans began to colonize the Appalachians, many Indigenous hunting and gathering practices were taught to the newcomers, who adopted this knowledge as their own. Likewise, edible and medicinal non-native plants—such as mullein, common dandelion, and upland cress—were introduced to this region by European colonists and were incorporated into Indigenous peoples’ foodways and medicinal practices. Other species were brought to the region through formal trade networks among tribes, which promoted alliance-building among culturally diverse groups. Tribes of the Monacan Alliance, for instance, were deeply involved in trade networks that American Indian Studies scholar Samuel Cook has characterized as “complex and sophisticated.”[vi]

As Cook and colleagues have argued, contrary to the popular belief that the area currently known as Southwest Virginia was simply an uninhabited “hunting ground” prior to European colonization, the vast Appalachian forests, meadows, and riparian zones claimed by settlers in the 1700s had been carefully tended and intentionally managed for centuries by Indigenous groups prior to European contact.[vii] Recognizing the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Eastern Siouan-speaking peoples—knowledge that was cultivated over thousands of years while stewarding the biodiverse landscapes of this region—is an important step toward rectifying the “historicide”[viii] that has long worked to erase Indigenous groups from historical and present-day understandings of Appalachian Virginia.

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[i] Stewart Scales, Victoria Persinger Ferguson, Thomas Klatka, Sam Cook, Jessica Taylor, Cedric Woods, and Emily Satterwhite, “Eastern Siouan Speaking Peoples, 17th Century,” https://ccc.vt.edu/index/aiicc/eastern-siouan-speaking-peoples.html (2001).

[ii] Gail E. Wagner, “’Their Women and Children do Continually Keepe it with Weeding’: Late Prehistoric Women and Horticulture in Eastern North America,” The Influence of Women on the Southern Landscape: Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscape, Oct. 5-7, 1995,” Old Salem, Inc., Winston-Salem, NC, (1997), 8-33.

[iii] Hutch Brown, “Wildland Burning by American Indians in Virginia.” Fire Management Today 60(3) (2000) 29-39. 

[iv] Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake, “Maintaining the Mosaic: The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management,” Journal of Forestry 99 (2001) 36-41.

[v] Kimmerer and Lake, p. 38.

[vi] Samuel R. Cook, Monacans and Miners: Native American and Coal Mining Communities in Appalachia, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, (2000).

[vii] Samuel R. Cook, Nicholas Copeland, Theresa Rocha Beardall, and Mae Hey, American Indian Studies Program’s Statement in Support of the Climate Justice Recommendations and Pathways for Virginia Tech’s Climate Action Commitment. Appendix A-4, Virginia Tech 2020 Climate Action Commitment Working Group Final Technical Report, Volume 2, (2020).

[viii] Jonathan D. Hill (ed.), History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas, 1492-1992, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, (1996).